Molecule Thin
by Jane Emma
Summary: Four month after Sonata, with hope of finding the cure dwindling, Mick and Beth are faced with an impossible decision. Josef intervenes with a case which reveals a shocking unconsidered alternative. But are they each willing to pay the price?


I strongly recommend you read the warnings and notes!

Description: Four month after the events in Sonata, with hope of finding the cure dwindling, Mick and Beth's relationship reaches a Turning point. As they are faced with an apparently impossible decision, the universe and Josef intervene with a case which reveals a shocking unconsidered alternative. But are Mick and Beth each willing to pay the price? This story picks up, more or less, where the series left off and tries to wrap the storyline.

Warnings: Mick/Beth, obviously. Ongoing. Slightly AU for later hints of serious sci-fi. Dark, in parts, so it's probably an R. I keep it mild, but my writing is probably not for lighthearted people with wild imaginations. OCs. Although I'm personally opposed usually opposed to OCs, they will later be included for the necessity of the plotline and to keep the story moving and provide some villains! I ask you to give the OCs a chance and promise in return to keep the main focus of the story on existing characters. ;)

Author's Note: Hey, everyone. I'm Jane Emma. I've written a lot for personal projects, though never fanfiction. I'm still working on the details and I'm hoping from some encouragement from you all to keep me interested in this project. Also, don't own most of the characters, not trying to violate copyrights, please don't sue, etc.

Warning(2): Deliciously un-betaed, except by yours truly

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**Molecule Thin  
**

**Prolouge – Four Months Later**

Mick St. John hazily recalled, some time past, experiencing the semi-conscious human state between waking and sleep, when weakened inhibitions led a half-dozing arm to bat at the alarm. Some have the luxury, thus awakened, of ignoring the shrill ring for the embrace of a lover's appetitive limbs. Life after death, a package deal including a biological clock effectively comparable to a satellite, had gradually done away with all that for him-----external time-keeping, warm arms, legs, and all---- until her.

Talk of the unspeakable past he'd always finish with a silent postscript of thanks: "until her." Letting his iron grip on the situation slip would have been unacceptable, until her. Free-falling into confessions of love was unthinkable, redrawing the strict lines of the bedroom, unspoken, until her. Each act a successive concession to a strong-willed woman he dare not lose and dare less keep. Reason enough for the taste of guilt and shame to linger on his tongue when, mirroring the half-coherent flavor of sleeplessness, he would awake in his sub-zero crypt to thoughts of Turning Beth.

She had made it perfectly clear what she wanted.

His feral side, at the half-slumbering protests of its better half, had managed to play out the scene in imagination. Stalking after her around the kitchen table, the living room couch---decorative stage pieces playing their parts in a ruse of normalcy--- she'd lose a shoe, an expensive velvet number, caught on the staircase in her struggle to escape. Finally cornered in the hallway, the monster would take her as the gentleman would never have the gall. Only then, satiated, would the beast give way to a devastated, love-struck man who would feed her and hold her as she died.

In these perverse dreams he wondered if his passionate pushy Beth, newly tainted with the violence of undeath, would take her revenge. A self-damning part of him wanted it. On the rarest of nights, he hoped and feared her forgiveness in the same breath: she would cling to him as he poured his heart into pleas of eternal devotion or begged on his knees for her not to hate him, not to leave.

Then Mick St. John fell back to nighttime, reality as such, and restrained the unbidden desires. He had never resolved to keep his temporary salvation so brutally. He had planned, at best, for a cure: one lifetime together. A naïve hope for the small kind of magic that modern medicine could offer a disease most people hadn't heard of.

Four months had reduced those aspirations to nothing. One of his solutions impossible, the other still unacceptable, had left him only a compromise between vampirism and mortality. A miracle to preserve the woman he loved perpetually young and untouchable but still delectably pulsing with life. They'd be a closed system, Beth had said. Who'd have had the audacity to dream that?

For that he planned against reason, aided by a group of friends and strangers, to face a sizable family of century-old vampires. He sat in the space of his living room, once a scene of pursuit in those dreams, now unrecognizable, loading the pilfered guns piled up around every corner with custom silver bullets, one by one. For such crimes of thought it had seemed a small price to pay.

Mick St. John, gentleman extraordinaire, had never imagined Beth Turner would pick up the tab.

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So, what exactly was it that Beth had made clear she wanted?

All this and more next time!

The next chapter (which will be considerably longer) "Four Months Ago," will pick up where Sonata left off and fill you in slowly. Through subsequent chapters, Mick, Josef, and Beth will recount the events leading up to the prologue. Then, the finale. Are you in?

Toodles!


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